Will to Powerlessness

It was inevitable that ANZAC Day would eventually become subject to the same pressures that assail Australia Day annually.  In the 2010s, this was spearheaded by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who first conflated the remembrance of Great War sacrifice with the suffering of Palestinians and other Muslims worldwide.  For this she was hounded from the country and fled to safer territory – London.  Supposedly the heart of the postcolonial legacy she spends so much time criticising, today’s London is no longer recognisably British.  This is the future her ilk want for all of us, for as she recently declared, she was merely ‘ahead of her time.’ 

Against this future, like a waning candleflame, are the memories of when we were a great civilisation.  That great civilisation warred with itself and created the conditions of decline we now grin and bear.  ANZAC Day stands in remembrance of a past almost entirely unrecognisable from the present.  The people who composed turn-of-the-century Australia are separated from us by the drift of time that renders history a foreign country.  Unprecedented change – technological, demographic and ontological – has rendered that drift a chasm.

The most recent ANZAC controversy revolves around the destruction of a Palestinian village by ANZAC troops in 1918.  The village was a Bedouin camp; according to contemporaneous observers, the massacre of at least 40 and as many as 137 villagers was undertaken by New Zealand troops, with some Australians in support, in reprisal for persistent theft and the occasional murder of servicemen.  This occurred after the Armistice, and was not part of any larger conflict.  Australia and New Zealand were billed by the Commonwealth to rebuild the village, but nobody was ever charged.

In 1948, the Mandate of Palestine would become Israel.  Thus Australia and New Zealand, in the eyes of today’s activists, are responsible for the perpetual violence that encases that part of the world.  From this we can glean a few things.

The first is the arrival of foreign tribal hatreds from far away that have little to do with the Atlanticism and propositional, post-enlightenment image of itself that Australia today holds.  We are perplexed that others are unwilling to sheer themselves from their roots, the way we have with ours.  Manning Clarke, who was by any reading an inveterate leftist, wrote of ‘The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green.’  Excited by Australia’s potential, he was apt to realise that we were was still recognisably a tree, cast in the image of the people who settled it.  This ethic has been carpet-bombed into oblivion, best illustrated by maudlin attempts to reimagine Australia along invented indigenous lines.  

We view severance with the genuine past as an ennobling, liberating act: this is why we talk about history as though it is a dead thing, only able to teach us ‘lessons’ on the traps that befell our jingoistic forbears.  We study history without humility, but with supreme hubris instead.  Much of history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly.  This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.  We cannot understand those populations unwilling to part from the past.  We view them as stupid and villainous in turn, which is a mistake.  It is a mistake because it causes us to underestimate peoples who think far longer-term than our eternal presentism. 

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere, is uncomfortable with notions of heritage that privilege any particular reading of the past, even readings that are positive.  This is why our current elite have such agony around events like Australia Day and ANZAC Day.  They cannot help but see the spectre of the self-confident white man of a prior era looking back at them.  What he would say about our current state is easy to imagine.  He might wonder why all that blood and treasure went to waste. 

There is a deeper undercurrent to this, beyond notions of identity and historical anguish.  This is to do with what we regard as moral in our age.  Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organise virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport.  We are suspicious of it.  We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master.  Nonetheless, power must be wielded.

Many men, as Aristotle long ago commented, are natural slaves.  A moment of clear-headed observation makes this evident and obvious, and we should have no shame in noting this.  The wise man recognises that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something – if not something or someone noble, then our appetites.  Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense.  Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly.  Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. 

Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite.  The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones.  In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.

Our elites lionise those without any power – political power manifested as groups, ideally – as the most pristine of saints.  Only he without any agency can ever be truly morally good, which is why many do two peculiar things.  The first is to make ourselves seem powerless before fate – be it systemic racism or institutionalised sexism, or whatever takes the postmodern role of the moirai – in order to obtain some of the power allowed by powerlessness.  This we see in indigenous groups that campaign for recognition, in contemporary civil rights movements, in Black Lives Matter in America, in the MeToo movement, and in most progressive imaginings of the world.  Only the victim can be among the elect, which is useful if by virtue of pareto distributions you desire to exploit large but otherwise useless groups as vote-slaves reliant on patronage.  The character of those Bedouin villagers massacred by rampaging Anzacs fits the postmodern classification of moral good more accurately than the sacrifices of those who landed at Gallipoli.  This crack in the armour of our national day, writ large in the present transnational spirit, is the leverage by which the other side desire to break it open. 

This is obviously a false dichotomy; one genuinely victimised by history is generally forgotten and swallowed by it.  This has been the fate of many.  So addicted are we to stories that parody the American Revolution that we forget that the underdog story generally resembles an antelope swimming across crocodile-infested rivers.  These people adopt these strategies because there is power promised by the mirage of powerlessness.  There is nothing to it more complicated than this.

The second effect of this inverted notion of power is to make elite culture utterly self-conscious when it comes to proclaiming anything from a position of strength.  They must talk about everything from the position of political rights and historical injustices with the sanctimony of a disingenuous priest.  This is why statements oppositional to this pique the interest of ordinary people, who have not drunk the state-sanctioned Kool-Aid to the same extent their bad masters have, and in many cases have parted ideational company from them without either party being entirely aware this cleavage has occurred.  It in part helps explain some of the populist victories in parts of the world, though there is more to be said about this. 

It makes one long for a time when this was straightforward, when men raised banners and leaders extoled crowds in plain language instead of paying their dues to oppressed groups for crumbs of mutual patronage.  A medley of spiteful mutants united behind a Leninist project can only be a wholly destructive force, and those of us who cleave to notions of Being with more permanence feel alienated and betrayed by our recently-elevated bad masters.  We should not be surprised that they have the deculturalising effect of rampaging orcs.  They are barbarians, and as Chesterton said, the barbarian creates only by accident.  Everything else they do is destruction. 

ANZAC Day pays tribute to a world that no longer exists.  We look through a strange portal into a time with entirely different readings of the world.  This disconnect has allowed avenues of attack that cannot yet find strong purchase, but in time will, as has happened with our other national day.  The problem with ANZAC Day is that it is the legacy of a world that most postmodern people don’t believe has any value.  It is hard for those with tertiary educations to feel a whisp of sympathy for a historical oppressor class being mowed down by machineguns and filleted by mortars.  They might not be able to articulate such feeling the way Yassmin Abdel-Magied managed, but it has settled in their marrow.  Such masters have no desire for continuance, only severance, including severance from those of us who see survival in continuance.